Traditional Alternatives
During the deliberations of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin in 1807, the secretary of the gathering, Abraham Furtado (1756–1817), a communal leader of progressive views, grew restless with the conservative positions of the traditionalist rabbis. He sought for a word to describe what he saw as their obduracy in the face of change. He called them in one of the first recorded uses of the phrase – “Orthodox Jews.”
The birth of the adjective “Orthodox” marks a significant turn in Jewish history. Hitherto there had been Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, rationalists and mystics, saints and scholars. There had been, during the previous century, sharp antagonisms between chasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim. Jews had been by no means a monolithic people. There were, among them, geographical, cultural, and intellectual differences. But these distinctions were set within an encompassing and unifying framework of belief and action.
To be a Jew was to be subject to halakhah, the vastly ramified provisions of Jewish law. That law, in turn, was derived either directly or indirectly from the Torah, the written record of the Divine revelation at Sinai. Rabbinic Judaism, as the ongoing application of the Oral Law, gave Torah its authoritative interpretation and safeguarded its observance through protective enactments and decrees. “Israel is only a people in virtue of its laws,” Saadia Gaon had written in the early tenth century, and the description remained accurate until modern times.
Lacking a common land, language, and culture, Jews remained identifiably a single people for they represented a community of action. They ate and refrained from eating the same foods. They celebrated Shabbat and the festivals in the same ways on the same days. They prayed using, by and large, the same words. They institutionalized the rabbinic passion for study in their schools and houses of study. They explored the shared canon of texts: Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah and Babylonian Talmud, the commentaries of Rashi and the codes of Maimonides and Joseph Karo. They could claim to be, indeed they were, linear descendants of the fathers of the rabbinic tradition: Hillel, Akiva, R. Judah ha-Nasi. The tradition itself traced its provenance back through the Great Assembly to the prophets, to the elders, and to Moses.
Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., nothing significant had changed in the terms of Jewish life. There were exiles and expulsions, inquisitions and pogroms, libels and disputations; but these were variations on a theme already set forth in the great Mosaic visions of national catastrophe in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Jewish people was in exile because of its sins. One day its sufferings would be ended, its punishment fulfilled, and though they were scattered to the farthest corners of heaven, Jews would be carried back to their land on Providence’s wings.
They remembered Jerusalem with sadness in the midst of their celebrations and they prayed toward it. But for the most part, though speculation was unending, they were hesitant about predicting the exact date of the messianic moment or doing anything to hasten its arrival. The centuries of exile had witnessed a succession of self-styled messiahs. Each had ended in disillusionment. The latest and most disruptive had been Shabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), a contemporary of Spinoza, whose promise of redemption had gripped the Jewish world from Italy to Yemen, from Turkey to Amsterdam. It ended in his forced conversion to Islam. From the Bar Kochba rebellion to Shabbateanism, anticipations of a new era had proved uniformly disastrous. Redemption would not be brought by revolution, but by piety, scholarship, and mystical devotions. The studied rabbinic indifference to history, between the end of the biblical period and the nineteenth century, was born of the bitter experience of premature utopias.
Challenges to Tradition
This tradition was threatened by modernity in a series of ways. Intellectually, the Enlightenment was hostile to tradition in general, seeing it as a vehicle of irrationality and superstition. A chain of thinkers of unquestionable eminence – Voltaire, as we have seen, was one; Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were others – reserved their particular scorn for Judaism. It was faulted either for having failed to evolve into Christianity, or, in the case of Nietzsche, for having given birth to Christianity. It represented, said Hegel, a slave morality; it was, argued Nietzsche, anti-nature and hence anti-life. So deep was the German hostility to the Jews of the ghetto that proponents and opponents of emancipation alike agreed that Jews were uncivilized. The only question was whether this was due to their environment or their nature. Their friends believed that Jews could be turned into responsible citizens by education and assimilation. Their critics held that they could not. That Jews were presently below the threshold of social acceptability, none disputed.
Specifically, the nineteenth century was one that was dominated by the idea of history as evolution. This favored a historical and naturalistic approach to sacred scriptures and led to a massive development of Spinoza’s early secularization of the biblical text. This now became the academic discipline of “biblical criticism” and it took as axiomatic, as Spinoza had done, that the text was to be understood not as unmediated Divine revelation directed at a particular historical community, but as the composite work of that community itself. How a given age reads the Bible tells us more about the age than about the Bible. The Enlightenment was an age of unlimited confidence in man and the progress of civilization. It took an unprecedentedly low view of the wisdom of the past. The Jewish idea of revelation – the power of the past to command all future generations – was almost impossible to translate into its terms of reference, as was the Jewish idea of covenant – the idea of a code of conduct binding only on a singular people. Any rule of behavior that was not universal, argued Kant, was ipso facto not ethical.
These ideas threatened Jewish belief at its roots. Of more immediate consequence, however, was the changing social environment. As we noted in the previous chapter, throughout the Middle Ages Jewish and non-Jewish perceptions coincided in keeping Jews a people apart. Now immense pressures, internalized by Jews, were directed at their social integration. The immediate result was a decline in the observance of laws that symbolized and enhanced this apartness: kashrut and Shabbat in particular. Reform legitimated this break with traditional behavior, but the break preceded the legitimation. The Jewish barriers against assimilation and intermarriage were collapsing.
Jews, too, were under pressure to give their children an education that would make them fully a part of the majority culture. The result was a collapse in the traditional system of Talmud Torah. Acculturation carried with it the price of a rapid decline in Jewish knowledge. A friend of Moses Mendelssohn, Naftali Herz Wessely (1725–1805), responded to the Austrian Emperor Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance which called on Jews either to send their children to Christian schools or to open schools of their own in which secular subjects would be taught. Wessely believed that the suggestion would enhance the position of Jews and he argued for compliance with it. There were, he argued, two sources of wisdom, the Torah of God and Torat ha-adam, secular knowledge. They were compatible. Each enriched the other. But secular knowledge was universal. The Torah, on the other hand, was directed at Jews alone. Therefore, secular studies should precede Jewish studies so that the latter would be built on the firm foundations of the former.
Wessely’s proposal was sharply criticized by, among others, the Vilna Gaon and R. Ezekiel Landau. But within a generation it had become the norm for a large section of the aspiring German-Jewish middle class. The extraordinary rabbinic culture of learning, in which personal standing within the community was to a large extent a function of knowledge and scholarship in the talmudic literature, was being replaced by the pursuit of secular literacy. By the mid-nineteenth century, a university education had come to be regarded as an essential qualification for the German Orthodox rabbinate.
Above all, the tradition could no longer be enforced. Mendelssohn’s proposal for the abandonment of the community powers of fines and excommunications, controversial in its day, quickly became the norm. Judaism became a voluntary faith and code of practice. To be sure, as Mendelssohn was at pains to point out, in a sense Judaism had been voluntary since the beginning of its long exile. Judah Halevi in the twelfth century had spoken with wonder at how few Jews had defected when “by a word spoken lightly” they could have “escaped this degradation” and converted to the dominant faith. But now there were alternatives that fell short of conversion. One could be a secular, or a nonobservant, or a Reform Jew. The scope of choice had widened significantly. Tradition had ceased to be the given and self-evident context of social life and had become, instead, one among many competing affiliations in the free market of ideas.
It was in this context that the word “Orthodoxy” was born. It was initially a term of criticism. Samson Raphael Hirsch later complained that “it was not the so-called Orthodox Jews who introduced the name ‘orthodoxy’ into the Jewish sphere.” It was first used by reformers as a pejorative description of the Altgläubigen or “old believers.” Judaism, Hirsch insisted, “does not recognize any variants. It knows of no Mosaic, prophetic or rabbinic, and of no orthodox or progressive Judaism. It is either Judaism or it is not.” But the word remained, for it designated a new reality. Orthodoxy represented the determination to continue Jewish existence in its classic forms in the conscious presence of alternatives. It was Jewish faith and practice in an environment that naturally supported neither. It was tradition in an untraditional age.
Western European Models of Modernity
The shock of modernity was not experienced in the same way or at the same time by the various Jewish communities of Europe. In England and France, as we have noted, emancipation proceeded without the formation of a significant Reform presence on the one hand or a revolutionary secularism on the other. Religious legitimation was not sought for social change, and the central Jewish institutions – the United Synagogue and Chief Rabbi in England, the Consistoire and Grand Rabbin in France – were able to adapt to the manners of a new age without substantive modifications of tradition. As Robert Liberles has described it, until the end of the nineteenth century “the religious institutions of England and France represented neither neo-Orthodoxy nor old Orthodoxy, but simply Jews and Judaism.”
The same was true of Italy, where the Jewish community had a long tradition of exposure to secular culture and could draw on the expansive traditions of medieval Sephardic Jewry. In 1769 Isaac Euchel could describe the Jews of Leghorn in images of harmonious interaction with their Gentile neighbors. They live, he wrote, “in fine homes amidst the nobles of the land, and their homes are stone-built and most of its people are merchants and notables…. They speak the language of the people correctly and eloquently like one of their orators…. My heart gladdens and I am proud to see my brothers living securely amidst the Gentiles without foe or troublemaker.” It was to the rabbis and scholars of Italy that Wessely turned when his program for a mixed secular Jewish education came under attack in Germany. Alone among the Jews of Europe, they came to his defense. Strongly traditional and without desire for reform, Italian Jews nonetheless took it for granted that Torah was to be combined with an acquaintance with and appreciation of non-Jewish culture.
In a quite different way, the chasidim of Eastern Europe avoided a direct and divisive encounter with modernity. Chasidism had emerged in the eighteenth century under the inspiration of the Baal Shem Tov (R. Israel b. Eliezer, c. 1700–1760) as a popular and pietist movement stressing mysticism, religious devotion, and enthusiasm. It was sharply opposed by traditional leaders like R. Elijah, the Vilna Gaon, for its emphasis on prayer and religious experience over talmudic study, its liturgical and halakhic innovations, and its focus on charismatic leadership – the personality of the Tzaddik or Rebbe. Nonetheless, as the nineteenth century took its toll of other traditional groups, it became clear that Chasidism was a powerful antidote to assimilation. Its communities were strong. Its leaders exercised a hitherto unprecedented degree of authority over their followers. Its embracing view of life constituted a kind of total and alternative culture that was relatively immune to secularization. Born as it was when the first tremors of a new age were just beginning to be felt, the chasidic movement created what might be called the first voluntary ghettos. They were communities sheltered behind a spiritual, not a physical, wall. But the barrier they erected against modernity was effective nonetheless.
In none of these environments did Orthodoxy experience the need to define and defend itself against internal conflicts. That crisis took place above all in Germany, where Reform had been born and where it had its greatest strongholds. Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of outstanding Orthodox scholars and religious leaders rose to the defense of tradition. They represented a new model of rabbinic leadership, formidably intellectual and unbending in their commitment to halakhah and the principles of Jewish faith. They embodied a synthesis new to German Jewry. Most were recognized talmudic authorities. But most, too, had acquired a university education. How innovative this was may be judged by the fact that in 1840 R. Solomon Tiktin of Breslau maintained that anyone who had studied at university was unfit to serve as a rabbi. They included Isaac Bernays, Jacob Ettlinger, Seligmann Baer Bamberger, Azriel Hildesheimer, David Zvi Hoffman, Marcus Horovitz, and Nehemiah Nobel. The figure, though, who captured the public attention and most effectively presented the philosophy behind this “articulate and self-conscious Orthodoxy” was Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888).
Samson Raphael Hirsch
Hirsch knew secular culture at first hand. Despite the fact that his grandfather, Mendel Frankfurter, had organized a Jewish school in Hamburg, Hirsch himself was sent to the local German grammar school. His Jewish studies were influenced by the Rabbi of Hamburg, Isaac Bernays, one of the first rabbis of the new type. At the age of twenty he studied for a year under another model, Jacob Ettlinger. He went on to the University of Bonn, where he developed a friendship with the future Reform leader, Abraham Geiger. In 1830 he accepted a position as the Rabbi of Oldenburg, a post previously held by Nathan Marcus Adler, later to become Chief Rabbi of England. It was there, during his eleven years in office, that Hirsch wrote the works that were to make him famous: Horeb, a systematic interpretation of Jewish law, and The Nineteen Letters on Judaism, published in 1836.
Hirsch confronted Reform on its own terms. Its premises could be granted, but the conclusions it drew were mistaken. Emancipation was to be welcomed for it offered Jews the chance more fully to live out their mission, which was to be an exemplary people set in the midst of other nations. It was to be a living witness to an existence determined not by the pursuit of power or pleasure but devoted instead to God. This imposed on Jews the “duty of separation, of ethical and spiritual separateness,” while at the same time involving themselves in the welfare of their host nation as active and constructive citizens. “Picture every son of Israel a respected and influential priest of righteousness and love, disseminating among the nations not specific Judaism…but pure humanity.”
This vision countered the claims of both the more defensive traditionalists, who saw participation in secular society as threatening, and the reformers, who argued that it meant giving up Jewish disciplines of “separation.” A major part of Hirsch’s work was devoted to showing that the commandments, far from being ritual to be accepted or rejected as “tradition,” were in fact symbolic enactments of profound ethical truths. Particularly original was his understanding of the chukkim, “the nonrational” laws, as ways of living out “justice toward the earth, plants, and animals.” Reform claimed to emphasize ethics over ritual. But it was, Hirsch argued, precisely in its ritual that Jewish ethics was concretely expressed. He pilloried Reform as an attempt to ease the burden of Jewish law, seeking to scale down Judaism to the level of man instead of raising man to the level of Torah.
Hirsch’s Judaism was breathtakingly free of any nostalgia for the past, for the ghetto and its enclosed culture. “I bless emancipation,” he wrote, “when I see how the excess of oppression drove Israel away from a normal life, limited the free development of its noble character, and compelled many individuals to enter…upon paths which they were too weak to refuse to enter.” The secularization of culture also meant the liberation of Jewish thought from its dependence on non-Jewish systems of philosophy. Hirsch criticized Maimonides for entering “Judaism from without” and presenting it in neo-Aristotelian terms. The spiritual challenge of Jewry’s newfound freedom was “to know Judaism out of itself” without apologetics or foreign borrowings.
The challenge could be met by a new form of Jewish education, one in which secular studies would be pursued from a specifically Jewish vantage point. “Nature should be contemplated with the spirit of David; history should be perceived with the ear of an Isaiah.” Hirsch called this synthesis, using a mishnaic phrase that had been earlier revived by Wessely, Torah im derekh eretz, “Torah combined with the way of the world.” He was critical of the schools of his day. The more traditional chadarim taught Judaism as “a mechanical habit.” The Reform schools saw Judaism as “something which should be interred in the grave of a past long since dead and buried.” A new kind of Jewish school would train young Jews to “be as familiar with the language of the Bible as they are with the language of the country in which they live…. Their eye should be open to recognize the world around them as God’s world and themselves in God’s world as His servants.”
The Nineteen Letters still, a century and a half after their publication, have the power to surprise by their extraordinary exhilaration at the breakdown of the old structures of Jewish life. To be sure, Hirsch admits, religious authority has been undermined. Reform abounds. The medieval kehillah has been dismantled. There are grave dangers that Jews will prefer economic and social advance to religious duty. But in the new freedom no authority can compromise the pursuit of truth and the power of example. Hirsch is absolutely confident that authentic Judaism will thrive by the competition of ideas in an open society. “Let the scales swing! The freer they hang and the more violently they now swing up and down, the truer and purer will be the estimate of the right principle of faith and life which they will determine in the end.”
Modern Orthodoxy
Hirsch was uncompromisingly Orthodox. Though he welcomed modernity, he made it clear that if there was a conflict between Judaism and the ethos of the age, it was the latter that would have to give way. “Instead of complaining that [Torah] is no longer suitable to the times, our only complaint must be that the times are no longer suitable to it.”
He was bitterly critical of Reform’s reduction of Judaism’s demands to the social aspirations of the bourgeoisie. It had, he said, “distilled the ancient world-ranging spirit of the Torah into a single aromatic drop of perfume so fragrant that…they could carry it round with them in their waistcoat pockets without being ashamed.” He was no less critical of the more conservative Zechariah Frankel for suggesting that the Oral Law was subject to historical development. He reserved some of his sharpest remarks for the movement for the academic study of Judaism, “Jewish Science.” To treat Judaism as a subject of detached historical analysis was, he argued, to rob it of all vitality. “What they have produced is not a physiology of living Judaism, but a pathological anatomy of a Judaism which according to their idea is already dead.” It was a criticism to be echoed a century later, in almost the same language, by the secularist Gershom Scholem.
But, though he himself did not use the term, Hirsch’s Orthodoxy was distinctively modern. There was no going back to the ghetto, which he saw as artificially limiting Judaism’s intellectual horizons. Hirsch made a clear distinction between custom and law. The particular forms in which Judaism had been expressed in the past were not sacrosanct except when expressly stipulated in the form of halakhah.
On the surface, this expressed itself in a number of cosmetic changes in synagogue style. In Oldenburg Hirsch adopted many of the aesthetic modifications that were associated with the early reformers. In the synagogue he wore clerical robes, preached in high literary German, introduced a choir, and insisted on decorum. He deleted the Kol Nidre prayer on Yom Kippur on the grounds that the renunciation of vows was being cited by critics as evidence of Jewish untrustworthiness. In Moravia he performed weddings inside the synagogue, then a new and suspect practice. In the fraught atmosphere of German Jewry these innovations seemed subversive. But Hirsch made a sharp differentiation between style and substance. Judaism could take on modern forms so long as its beliefs and laws were unchanged.
But the perception went deeper. Hirsch was the first to recognize that Jewish identity in the modern state was quite different from what it had been in the enclosed, autonomous community of the Middle Ages. There Judaism embraced the totality of life: language, dress, culture, cuisine. To be sure, it was not hermetically sealed against outside influences. Jews were inveterate borrowers from their surrounding cultures. But within the community such borrowings were quickly naturalized and became part of the organic texture of Jewish life.
Now, under emancipation, Judaism would embrace only part of life: the home, the school, and the synagogue. Vast areas of the Jews’ experience – at work, in social life, as a citizen, and as a participant in the arts and sciences – would be conducted in a secular context. Hirsch saw that being secular rather than Christian, these experiences were halakhically neutral and thus permitted. But Jewish identity would not be split, rather than integrated, between Jewish and secular involvements – Torah and an increasingly significant derekh eretz. Hirsch called this dual personality Mensch-Jissroel, “man-Israel.”
Hirsch did not see this as an inner conflict. But it is precisely here that his thought had most in common with nineteenth-century Reform. The synthesis between the two identities is created by Hirsch’s emphasis on the Jewish “missions” to humanity, and his marked downplaying of Judaism’s national motifs. The land and State of Israel were, he argued, not significant in themselves. They were merely one context of Judaism’s religious role. Exile and dispersion were not a disaster. Instead they “opened a new, great and widespread field for the fulfillment of its mission.” Jews prayed for a return to Zion, but that lay in the messianic future and “actively to accelerate its coming is prohibited to us.” Hirsch was neutral or negative toward the developing Zionist movement, unlike his contemporary, Hildesheimer, and his Italian counterpart, Samuel David Luzzatto. His successors took this further and led the campaign for Orthodox dissociation from the Zionist movements, which resulted in the creation of Agudat Yisrael.
Hirsch, in other words, created an Orthodoxy for a post-emancipation diaspora. It proved remarkably effective, though not quite in the way he intended. European society was in no mood to regard Jews as models of “pure humanity.” Nor did the academic study of science and history lend themselves, as Hirsch had hoped, to religious interpretation. To the contrary, Darwinian biology and Hegelian history challenged, if they did not refute, religious belief. What emerged instead was a compartmentalized identity, and what Hirsch’s model community in Frankfurt showed was that such an identity – nurtured and supported by a strong school and synagogue framework – was viable and could be passed on across the generations.
One could be part of the modern world without religious compromise. But there was a price to be paid in divided selfhood. The traditional harmony of the religious personality was gone. That lack of integration between the Jew as Jew and as secular citizen has haunted modern Orthodoxy to the present day. A much later thinker, R. Joseph Soloveitchik, was to come to the conclusion, in the sharpest possible contrast to medieval Jewish thought, that the essence of religious experience lay in ceaseless conflict.
Rav Avraham Kook
Not surprisingly, there were others who dissented strongly from this conception of Jewish life. Traditionally, Judaism had embraced both private and public life. One could not confine it within the space allocated by modern society to religion – the family and the local congregation – without robbing it of its breadth, richness, and diversity. The dichotomy, essential to diaspora modern Orthodoxy, between religious and secular, ran counter to the whole thrust of Judaism which sought the sanctification of all aspects of existence. The Torah had envisaged this taking place through the building of an ideal society in the land of Israel. In exile, in their autonomous communities, Jews had created a kind of surrogate Israel with its own clear borders and its self-sufficient culture. But the ghetto and shtetl were disintegrating. Emancipation now made the terms of exile intolerable. Judaism would survive only among the few, and even then in artificial and constricted forms. There was no alternative but to rise to the challenge of messianic destiny and once again attempt to build a Torah-centric society on the soil of the promised land.
No one presented this view more forcibly than R. Avraham ha-Cohen Kook (1865–1935), an Eastern European mystic who became the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine. R. Kook came from a world different from that of Samson Raphael Hirsch. The Jews of Eastern Europe, unlike those of Germany, developed no Reform movement. Enlightenment and the breakdown of tradition came instead in the form of an often militant secularism. And whereas Western European culture encouraged an emphasis on the individual, the East was more collectivist in its thought. From these influences came Jewish socialism and communism, movements for a Jewish cultural identity expressed in Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and the main body of support for political Zionism.
R. Kook could not interpret these expressions of secular Jewish identity as negatively as Hirsch had seen Reform. Firstly, they were strong affirmations of Jewishness, without the assimilationism that haunted German Jewry. Secondly, some of the secularists had deep roots in the tradition. Volozhyn Yeshivah, where R. Kook had studied, included among its alumni the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), the writer Mischa Berdyczewski (1865–1921), and the historian and literary critic Joseph Klausner (1874–1958), all approximate contemporaries of Kook. Volozhyn, despite its rigid policy of excluding secular study, became a center of heated debate among its students about Zionism and modern thought. It was here that R. Kook discovered the religious roots of Jewish secularism. Thirdly, he was intellectually and temperamentally a mystic, convinced of the inner holiness of the Jewish soul, however rebellious its outer manifestations. These perceptions combined to produce the most positive evaluation ever given by an Orthodox thinker of non- and anti-religious Jews. How, then, was the breakdown of Judaism to be explained and overcome?
The explanation lay in the fact of exile, galut. The solution lay in the end of exile by the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael. No Jewish thinker since the prophets had expressed himself in such visionary terms about the renewal of Jewish life in its land. “Eretz Yisrael,” he wrote, “is part of the very essence of our nationhood; it is bound organically to its very life and inner being.” Biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and mystical motifs fuse in Kook’s remarkable rhapsody to the power of the land to overcome the doubts and conflicts of exile. “It is the air of the land of Israel that makes one wise, that illuminates the soul to enlighten that element which is derived from the world of unity. In the land of Israel one draws upon the light of Jewish wisdom, upon that quality of spiritual life which is unique to the people of Israel, upon the Jewish world view and way of life which are essentially derived from the dominance of the world of unity over the divided world.”
Exile leads to the slow death of the soul. In the diaspora “the pristine well of the Jewish spirit stops running.” Judaism survives, but in attenuated forms, as the study of texts and the fulfillment of the commands. It is no longer coextensive with the whole of life. It cannot live in the present, for it is sustained only by the past and the future “by the power of a vision and by the memory of our glory.” Naturally, then, some larger spirits – Kook called them “souls of chaos” – grow restless with conceptualized and institutionalized Judaism, and rebel. These are the “pangs of cleansing” that precede the messianic age. Exile has reached its natural and Providential end. “The diaspora is disintegrating at an alarming rate, and there is no hope for it unless it replants itself by the wellspring of real life…which can be found only in Eretz Yisrael.”
The heart of the religious consciousness, for R. Kook, is the sense of the unity of all creation. Evil is only apparent. All falsehood comes from seeing objects, events, and ideas as things in themselves. Once their place in the order of creation becomes clear, so too does their goodness and essential sanctity. Thus socialism, considered in itself, is evil. It leads to materialism and oppression. But it has a holy core. It is a protest against injustice. Secular Zionism is an evil when it takes nationalism as an end in itself. It too, though, is essentially holy for it embodies a self-transcending love for the Jewish people. In R. Kook’s kabbalistic terminology, exile is the “world of division” and tends naturally to make Jews think in segmented and divisive ways. Israel is the “world of unity” which will harmonize, and therefore sanctify, the various Jewish secularisms.
As well as unity, R. Kook’s thought turns constantly on the idea of teshuvah or return, understood in its full range of biblical and rabbinic resonances: the religious return to tradition, the ethnic return to peoplehood, and the geographical return to the land. The three are inseparable. Teshuvah had been understood in rabbinic thought primarily as repentance for sin. But for R. Kook, sin means separation and teshuvah means reunification. Even secular Zionism was therefore part of this process, for it had reunited Jews with their people and land, and the third component – reunification of Jews with Judaism – was bound to follow. All this is seen, in R. Kook’s writings, as part of the Divine flow of time, an evolutionary current that was bearing Jews, with or against their will, toward a spiritual rebirth.
R. Kook’s conception of Judaism is almost a polar opposite of that of Hirsch. Far from seeing derekh eretz as neutral, R. Kook believed that the religious task was to sanctify the secular: agricultural labor, the arts and sciences, and the political process. He saw positive significance in the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. General culture, he wrote, was like a garment. Specifically religious acts were like the fringes on the garment, which revealed it to be a holy object. But Jews could only sanctify a culture that was in essence a Jewish culture. This was now impossible in the diaspora. Emancipation, far from heralding a new mission for Jews in exile, in fact signaled the end of that long chapter of Jewish history. A revival beckoned, but it would take place elsewhere.
The Strategy of Resistance
Hirsch and Kook represent the working out, within the parameters of tradition, of the tensions that produced the two great breaks with tradition – Reform Judaism and secular Zionism, respectively. Hirsch showed that the rich premodern life of Torah could be translated into the narrower ambit of a “religion” without any halakhic or ideological concessions to modernity. Kook showed that the idea of Judaism as the spirit of a “nation” could be articulated without secularizing the ideas of land, state, or people. Alongside Hirsch was a range of thinkers who, while subscribing to his idea of Torah im derekh eretz, interpreted it somewhat differently; most notably, R. Soloveitchik. Alongside R. Kook, too, were those who saw the relationship between Judaism and Zionism in less messianic, more pragmatic terms, most notably, R. Isaac Reines. Hirsch and Kook, then, do not between them exhaust the range of Orthodox responses to modernity, but they do define two broad directions, what one might loosely call modern Orthodoxy on the one hand and religious Zionism on the other.
But there was a third alternative. This was to reject the terms of Clermont-Tonnerre’s choice altogether, and decline the offer of emancipation. Sociologists call this strategy neotraditionalism. In the contemporary Jewish vocabulary it is sometimes described as ultra- or right-wing or charedi Orthodoxy. What is important for our analysis is that – in common with Hirsch and R. Kook, and unlike Chasidism and nineteenth-century English and French Jewries – it arises from a conscious confrontation with modernity. It is not tradition as such, but Orthodoxy in the presence of alternatives. Though it negates modern culture, it is dialectically related to it. Its architect was the great leader of Hungarian Jewry in the early nineteenth century, R. Moses Sofer (the Chatam Sofer, 1762–1839).
Born and educated in Frankfurt, R. Sofer had seen at first hand the early impact of the Enlightenment. Convinced that secularization carried greater dangers for Jewish continuity than the religious persecutions that had preceded it, he set about organizing an active defense of the old order. In strict halakhic terms, for example, Moses Mendelssohn had not advocated any religious reforms. But he had begun the process of German-Jewish acculturation. His translation of the Bible into German was, for many, the gateway into a new language and from there into its new and disruptive ideas. R. Sofer sharply opposed the translation, as he did the schools that had been created along the lines recommended by Wessely. They were attempts to rationalize tradition and render it acceptable to the intellectual assumptions of the age. As a result they would expose it to an environment in which it could not survive. What Hirsch was later to see as neutral, permissible changes of custom and style, R. Sofer saw as the first breaches in the fence around Jewish identity. Adapting a talmudic maxim, he declared chadash assur min ha-Torah, “the new is biblically forbidden.”
His successors were to view the kind of adaptations undertaken by German Orthodoxy as a danger to Jewish survival, a kind of incipient reform. They opposed aesthetic changes in the synagogue – vernacular sermons, choirs, ministerial robes, and moving the bimah or reader’s platform from the center to the front of the synagogue. Though R. Sofer was not opposed to all forms of secular education, he was certainly averse to giving it the independent legitimacy later to be implied in Hirsch’s ideal of synthesis. His followers were also deeply suspicious of the professionalization of the rabbinate. Azriel Hildesheimer, who was ultimately to found a successful rabbinical seminary in Berlin, encountered massive opposition when he first attempted the project in the Austro-Hungarian community of Eisenstadt.
Underlying these attitudes was a judgment sharply at odds with that of Hirsch and Kook. Modernity is systematically destructive of Jewish faith, observance, and identity. There is no way of negotiating it successfully, either through diaspora synthesis or the dynamic of a Jewish state. The alternative is to resist it. This is not in itself a novel idea within the Jewish tradition. In a sense, Jewish life in biblical and rabbinic times had been built on separation and segregation. But the old barriers were collapsing. New ones had therefore to be erected in their place. This meant a conscious, deliberate, and voluntary withdrawal from secular society, and ultimately from those elements of the Jewish community that had accommodated themselves to it. The significance of R. Moses Sofer in the development of modern Jewry is that he saw the choice in these clear-cut terms and made his decision unerringly against the current of the age.
But this in itself would not have been successful had it not been for his further foresight. Only a minority could be expected to opt for an Orthodoxy thus defined. The problem was how to make that minority self-sustaining and turn it into an elite that would eventually, through its leadership, feed back into the wider community. The answer lay in the creation of a new institution, or rather the evolution of one of Judaism’s oldest institutions: the yeshivah. The yeshivah had traditionally been simply a place of talmudic instruction and had been closely linked to the local community. The new yeshivah was to differ from the old in several important respects. It would be an independent establishment, financed by voluntary donations elicited by its emissaries. It would draw its students from a wide geographical catchment area. Its aim would not be merely educational. It would create within its walls an intense, enclosed, and total environment from which secular ideas would be excluded. Its students would be a peer group, a spiritual aristocracy. They would be encouraged to see themselves as the select guardians of tradition. They would be leaders in the defense of faith. The yeshivah would become, in other words, a fortress against a hostile world.
R. Sofer created his yeshivah shortly after his arrival in Pressburg in 1808. It quickly became the largest since Babylonian times. Others appeared throughout Eastern Europe: Mir, Slobodka, Telz, Lomza, and Ponevezh among them. Perhaps the most famous was the yeshivah of Volozhyn, founded in 1802 by R. Chaim Volozhiner and renowned for its outstanding teachers, R. Naftali Berlin (the Netziv, 1817–1893), and R. Joseph Baer Soloveitchik (the Bet ha-Levi, 1820–1892) and his son R. Chaim Soloveitchik (the Brisker, 1853–1918). Each had its own distinctive subculture and style of study, and they generated strong loyalties among their alumni.
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the confrontation that divided East European Jewry came between chasidim and their opponents, the mitnagdim. R. Sofer belonged to the anti-chasidic school. But it quickly became apparent that the two groups were on the same side in the battle against acculturation. Though they did not formally join forces until the founding of Agudat Yisrael in 1912, they gradually developed strong structural similarities.
On the one hand, the yeshivah created an environment not unlike that of a chasidic community. Removed from home, segregated from the local community at a formative period of their lives, the students came to invest their yeshivah heads with the same kind of quasi-parental authority with which chasidim regarded their Rebbes. Leadership dynasties began to appear, not the least of which was represented by R. Sofer’s own son and grandson. Many yeshivot, too, found it necessary to supplement talmudic study with devotional and ethical teaching. Musar, as this group of disciplines became known, was non-mystical, but it was a functional equivalent of Chasidism. In the opposite direction, as the nineteenth century progressed, the chasidic movement itself began to emphasize talmudic study and create its own yeshivot. Chasidic leadership became less charismatic and more organizational. Despite their profound differences, the two movements were converging sociologically and institutionally.
Covenantal Interactions
These, then, were the traditional alternatives. There were the Jewries of England, France, and Italy which adapted to modernity without the need for philosophical self-definition. There was German Orthodoxy, born out of the confrontation with Reform, epitomized in Samson Raphael Hirsch’s articulate synthesis of Judaism and secular culture. There was R. Kook’s religious Zionism, with its unique blend of mysticism and East European collectivism. And there was the movement, initiated in Hungary by R. Moses Sofer, to resist modernity by creating enclaves of Jewish learning.
They differed in their cultural styles and in their evaluation of and interactions with the wider society. Their emphases were different, as were their images of the ideal Jewish life. It should be clear though that these variations, pronounced though they were, were less due to the inner logic of Judaism than to the encounter between Judaism and several very different societies. In each case the Orthodox objective was the same: to preserve a community that embodies the values by which Jewish lives had been lived since biblical times. How this was best to be achieved depended on the social context. What was viable in Germany was judged counterproductive in Hungary. The challenges to Judaism differed between Berditchev and Birmingham.
What the various Orthodoxies held in common was the conviction that Jewish values and law were not human constructs, open to change, but a Divine revelation, commanding loyalty through the generations. They were nonnegotiable. Even radical social and intellectual upheaval could not change the terms of the covenant on which Jewish existence was based. If Jews had survived the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of national autonomy, the Crusades and the blood libels, the Spanish Inquisition and Chmielnicki massacres, they would survive the blandishments and animosities of emancipation, and on the same terms: according to the laws of Moses and Israel. To the question, “Which takes precedence, Sinai or the spirit of the age?” an Orthodox Jew can give only one answer. Samson Raphael Hirsch spoke for all when he wrote: “We declare before heaven and earth that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilization and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us truly religion, the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way.”
We have charted the diverging paths of Jewish modernity. The Count of Clermont-Tonnerre’s speech to the French National Assembly in 1789 set in motion a fundamental questioning of Jewish identity that has lasted to the present. Some saw it as essentially religious, but were convinced that Judaism must make accommodations to its new environment. Thus were born a series of denominations, Reform, Liberal, Reconstructionist, and Conservative. Others saw it as essentially national. From them flowed a succession of Jewish secularisms, cultural, political, ethnic, and above all, secular Zionism, the project of rebuilding the Jewish people within the framework of its own modern state.
There were those, though, who believed as a matter of profound religious faith that the Jewish destiny must continue the path trodden by Abraham, Moses, Hillel, Akiva, Rashi, Maimonides, the Baal Shem Tov, and the Vilna Gaon. They were labeled by their opponents, “Orthodox.” The existence of the adjective testified to the schisms already dividing European Jewry. Orthodoxy itself was united in seeing that the religious and national elements of Judaism could not be divorced from one another. But it was internally divided as to which should be emphasized as the imperative of the hour. Samson Raphael Hirsch stressed the religious, R. Kook, the national. Each agreed that modernity promised benefits as well as dangers to Jewish life. From this judgment, R. Sofer on the one hand, chasidim on the other, dissented. Judaism, they argued, should resist rather than go with the flow of the times.
Two hundred years later, how have these alternatives fared? Which evaluations proved accurate and which strategies successful? What is the state of Jewish identities in the late twentieth century?